"You've got to be kidding! He didn't seem capable of being part of a ma.s.s-a.s.sa.s.sination scheme. Starfleet captains had been tossing him from ship to ship like a hot potato to keep the Romulans from knowing where he was. I couldn't figure why he'd be so important. I thought they just didn't want to bother with him!"

McCoy explained, "The Romulans tracked the royal infection back to his cargo. That's why they think the Federation started it. The Romulans wanted him so they could have a scapegoat and tell their people they'd caught the culprit, that the Federation was definitely to blame for the deaths of their royal family." "Where is Hensley now?" Spock asked. "Aboard Saskatoon ?"

Stiles shrugged hopelessly. "No, I don't have him. I didn't want him. He's safe, though. We remanded him to the custody of the first Starfleet law-enforcement ship we found." "Which ship?" "The Ranger."

Spock immediately turned and depressed the keypad of the bridge comm unit. "Captain Picard, do you know the name of the pa.s.senger who was kidnapped from the Ranger this morning?" 'I'll pull the report, amba.s.sador. One moment."

"I'll put Dr. Crusher on it," McCoy said. "They want her help. They'll treat Hashley well."

"It's my fault," Stiles said. He had left the conversation they were having and was having one with himself. "I never checked... never confirmed that Zevon had been rescued. He was so sure his family would get him out-he made me sure too. Until five days ago I was completely convinced that he was back home. Now I find out he never... they just didn't bother to go get him. All these years he's been trapped in Pojjana s.p.a.ce, by himself, without me... because of me. When I found out they'd left him, the only filing I could think to do was try to get your help."

In all his years Spock had witnessed many examples of human fidelity and found he appreciated them all. At first he had looked down his nose at such demonstrations. Later he had learned to accept them with some curiosity, and even to accept that part of himself.

Spock moved to stand near Stiles, to make sure he had all the attention he needed.

"You and Zevon were friends," he began. "I deeply appreciate that. You depended upon each other in the worst of times. Today you still understand what happened to you, the forces that worked upon your lives. Time has not dulled your decency. Today, as I watch you in your effort and your torments, I cross yet another barrier to fondness. I enjoy the humanity I see in you, this childlike sense of justice that defies all forces. Like a whirlpool you draw us all into your devotion. We will go to save the Romulans, yes. But because of you will we go also to save Zevon."

McCoy watched them both with a charming softness. Spock noticed the doctor's gaze, but did not meet it.

Stiles clearly battled the pressure of tears behind his eyes. Solemnly he murmured, "Every time I see you... you rescue me in some way."

A swelling sensation of completeness satisfied Spock deeply. While before this there had been only a duty, a mission, now there was a quieter and more profound purpose. Crossing the quadrant to save a nation had its appeal. Crossing to save a friend had even more.

"Well, Spock" McCoy interrupted, "you and I seem to have a mission in Po'jjan s.p.a.ce."

Stiles came abruptly to life as a balloon suddenly fills with air, apparently afraid that they would make some other choice for some reason he failed to see. "Let me take you! We've got a thick hull, nonaggressive configuration, support registry-completely unprovoking in nature, just a big industrial muscle. We've got full regulation defensive weapons, and we all know what that really means. Let me take you through Romulan s.p.a.ce in the CST. It's perfect! It's a good option. And I know the way!"

McCoy raised his frosty brows. "Imagine never thinking of that. Silly us."

Stiles took that as a threat. "If you don't clear me to go with you, I'll go anyway." McCoy looked at Spock. "Remind you of anybody?"

Chapter Fifteen.

" O RSOVA. "

"What do you want now? Why do you bring me to s.p.a.ce this time? You always call at bad times for me! I was busy!"

"The Pojjana lion of science. Genius savior of the planet. Engineer of the Constrictor meter. Conqueror of the Constrictor. Still amazed to see open s.p.a.ce. You know nothing about science." "I know everything. I have power now" "You have Zevon now."

Picking himself up from the strange carpet where he had fallen after the dizzying effect of a transporter beam, Orsova bristled and tried to appear confident. "Zevon works for me."

"Zevon does all the work you take credit for. I know the difference. I helped make it happen. Now I want something from you. A Federation ship is coming your way,"

"Federation? Why! This is Red Sector! How can they come here!"

"They have new business here. They have visited Romulan s.p.a.ce."

"Romulan? Why would they go there? They have no treaty! Have they... ?"

As the Voice summoned him again, Orsova felt the sting of being completely out of touch with the s.p.a.ce-active civilizations of the quadrant for so many years. All this time Red Sector had been a huge favor for him, a sanctuary where a prison guard could rise to power if he 'knew how to play on public opinion-and if he had a Voice to tell him each step.

That had been easy. Play to the hatred. The Pojjana had been ready, eager, to despise and distrust. The Voice was right. Orsova had used that. Found it easy. Surrounded himself with those eager to hate most, happy to have theft distrust bring them also to power, and learned how to nurture the distrust even when there was no one around to hate anymore.

Making them accept Zevon, an alien... that had taken time. But it had been the most important part.

Now this ghost, this Voice, came to him when he no longer needed it. Orsova knew in his gut that this speaking person was an alien.

"Why would the Federation come again after all these years?" he asked. "What do they want here? We have no Federation people in Red Sector."

"They have their reasons. You will have to be prepared to stop them. Crash their ship, destroy it, or drive them off. Kill them if you can." "But why are they coming?"

"Can your planetary defense destroy a Starfleet ship? This is not a starship, but a utility vessel-"

"You don't know why they're coming, do you?" Suddenly emboldened, Orsova blurted his revelation. "You don't know, do you, Voice?" "Information is diaphanous. It changes." "Means, you don't know why they're coming." "When I need you again, I will beam you to me." "In s.p.a.ce?" "Wherever I must be." "Means, you have to hide from them."

"Go back now. Go now, and get ready to face the Federation. Make them go from here, and there will be even bigger rewards for you."

Chapter Sixteen.

The Imperial Palace, Romulan Star Empire "MY NAME IS BEVERLY CRUSHER, Commander, Medical Corps, Starfleet. I'm here to treat the empress."

"Yes, Dr. Crusher, we have agreed to give you cooperation. I am Sentinel Iavo." "Sentinel? Not Centurion?"

"I am a member of the Royal Civil Attach~ to the Imperial Court, not pan of the Imperial s.p.a.ce Fleet. We discovered long ago that military t.i.tles for our civil officials only caused dangerous confusion. Where is your ship docked? At the munic.i.p.al s.p.a.ceport?"

"No. We were dropped off. The ship has left. It's just the two of us now." "The two of you? No guards? No Starfleet security?" "I don't need them, do I? We have an agreement... don't we?"

Standing before Beverly Crusher, Sentinel Iavo was a very handsome Romulan with typically dark brown hair but remarkably large and pale green eyes. He wore his Imperial Court uniform with a certain casualness, and his clothing indeed was not like that of the military guards stationed in the hallways they'd pa.s.sed through. She couldn't guess his age-that was tricky with Romulans-though he didn't strike her as particularly young. He stood in the expected Vulcanlike posture, straight and contrived, the only clue to any nervousness his constant rubbing of the fingernails of one hand against the palm of the other hand.

The palace was a four-century-old monolith, its stone walls dressed in tapestries and heavy draperies like any Austrian castle, except the rooms and corridors were lit by modern fixtures-not a torch in sight. Funny-she'd expected torches.

And there was music playing. Harp-like music, backed sometimes by the hollow beat of a tenor drum and a hint of something similar to a cello in the background. No musicians visible-nope, it was a sound system. She smelled incense, too, faintly. Or dinner.

The Sentinel gave her a moment to look around, then asked, "What would you like first?"

"I want you to close up the palace completely," she began. 'Total security. n.o.body in or out without high clearance, n.o.body at all. You're the highest advisor?"

"Correct, Doctor, I am the empress's senior civil authority. I have held this post since before the emperor died, and my brother before me, and our father before him."

"Oh, isn't that nice... then you have the authority to enact my terms. No changes of personnel from now on. Whoever's in the kitchen will stay there and keep working. The same maids, the stone servants, the same everybody. These same guards will stay on duty here. They can sleep here if they have to, but I don't want to see anybody new. When you have your security in place, I'd like everything and everybody cleared through my lovely a.s.sistant here."

Crusher made what she hoped was a graceful half-turn and held out a hand. At her side and a polite couple of steps behind, Data offered her the medical tricorder. He also held their two duffel bags and Crusher's hospital-in a-bag medical satchel, full of all the instruments, medications, and a computer with both an immunological database and a general medical lexicon. The load was a little c.u.mbersome because she'd packed everything she could think of. There was going to be no calling for supplies.

Data said nothing. The only expression of personality was the poignant lack of it, and perhaps the sheen of soft lightning, reflected off the velvet, casting a glow that turned his metallic complexion herbal.

"You needn't have brought so many medical supplies, Dr. Crasher" Iavo told her as he took one of the duffels from Data. "We have eight major hospital complexes in the city, which will bring anything you require to treat the empress."

"Mr. Iavo, when I say I want security, I mean absolute security. I want nothing delivered from anywhere as of right now. Nothing comes into the palace. Not medicine, not food, not people, not weapons."

"There are no weapons here, madam" the Sentinel a.s.sured. "The palace is completely energy-secure. Our security office constantly monitors any active energy, and would instantly identify an armed disruptor or phaser-"

"Hmm. I wondered why all your guards carried daggers," Crusher recalled. "I thought it was just traditional. Where's the empress?" "This way, please."

Another corridor. An obviously private series of chambers, more guards, one more short corridor... finally, Iavo cleared Crusher and Data into the empress's bedchamber.

And what a place it was. Draped in soft green velvet embossed with ancient symbols, softly lit by unseen fixtures, carpeted with something that seemed like rabbit fur, the room was warm and thick with the scent of burning herbs. In the center of the room was a sitting area with a generous couch and an oblong blackwood table with a single chair.

There were two female attendants hovering near the bed, and four imperial guards, each in a uniform and helmet, standing near the bed posts. The bed had six posts, each as thick as a full-grown man's body and carved with angular features of hands and faces, each hand holding one of the faces and pushing it toward the ceiling. Each face grimaced h.e.l.lishly, and in its teeth held a carved skewer that stuck out from the totem, so that the bedposts bristled like a bottle brush with wooden spikes. Some of the spikes were broken off, yet the blunt ends darkened and showing no wounded wood, hinting that the bed was very old. The wood had never been stained, it had just blackened with sheer age.

And in the bed, bundled in velvet and fur, was the young empress. Her eyes were closed, but not in rest. Her hair was meticulously combed yet l.u.s.terless, almost crispy from her long fight to stay alive, as her body sapped whatever healthy cells it could draw back into itself in its last desperations.

All over the empire, members of the royal family looked like that, or had, or soon would.

Crusher approached the bed, aware that Data was right behind her, maintaining a student-like silence. She listened briefly to the empress's respiration, looked at her complexion, noted her skin color, an obscene russet-very wrong-but did not touch her.

"Communications relays have been set up all over the empire for you. Attending physicians are standing by for your instructions."

"Are they willing to cooperate with a Federation physician?" she asked.

Iavo seemed embarra.s.sed, or perhaps hopeless. 'They have tried everything they know." Crusher folded her arms. "Yes... I suppose they have." And she simply stood there, a hip c.o.c.ked, said nothing more, and did nothing, while the harp music plucked the draperies.

Data's amber eyes flicked between her and Iavo, but he also said, as she had instructed, nothing.

Iavo watched as his empress moaned softly, unattended. The two female attendants peered uneasily. The helmeted guards remained at attention, but their eyes shifted. "Are you going to treat her?" Iavo finally asked. "Yes, but I'll need something from you," Crusher said. "What do you want from us?" Iavo asked. Now he got it.

She took one step toward him, then locked her stance. "I want Ansue Hashley. Bring him here, alive."

"All right, Mr. Hashley, I've heard enough." "But I want to finish telling you about-" "No, that's enough talking. Sit still while I finish sealing this" Crusher stood over Ansue Hashley's ragged bulk and shook her head in disgust. He was bruised, cut, flushed, nicked in a hundred places, and pale from loss of blood, yet somehow that mouth kept running and running.

"You know, Sentinel Iavo," she began as her seamer's beam sketched closed the last cut on Hashley's face, "you people didn't have to torture this man. If you'd open up your borders and deal with humans more, you'd know after talking to this man for ten minutes that he doesn't have it in him to organize a ma.s.s-a.s.sa.s.sination plot. And we would've told you about the prion-based epidemic we've been fighting. Imperial isolationism has hurt you this time."

Near the empress's bed, Iavo rubbed his forefingernail against his other hand's thumb knuckle and protested with his expression. "The infection was imported on his vessel. We tracked it back to a low-level medication in his cargo bound for-"

"He's a busy little gossip, not a biological terrorist" Crusher insisted as Hashley's big sopsy eyes blinked up at her. "That medicine has been coming in here for more than forty years from a pharmaceutical company sympathetic to Romulans. All Mr. Hashley did was bring it in. Somebody else engineered the tainting of the shipment and then the delivery of the tainted stuff to all the royal family members. Hashley here is just a dupe." "Whose dupe?"

Crusher shook her head and let herself rattle on, spilling her thoughts. "n.o.body clever enough to distribute this infection would run a little trade route for ten years. If you knew more about humans it's kind of obvious this man's not biding his time to take over the universe. Romulans might be that tenacious, but humans don't have the patience. Or a two-hundredyear lifespan. Why do you think we're always in such a d.a.m.n hurry? Gotta get things done before we die."

Pacing uneasily nearby, Sentinel Iavo switched fingernails and leered doubtfully at Ansue Hashley, who sat like a bruised puppy. "Whose dupe was he?"

"We're not sure," Crusher admitted. "Dr. McCoy's right, though. It's got all the earmarks of a series of cross-racial multiprion plagues. Until recently, n.o.body put them together. The first clue was just three years ago at Deep s.p.a.ce Nine. Well-then the station was called Terok Nor."

"I remember that!" Hashley offered. "Carda.s.sians, Bajorans and Ferengi all got the same sickness! They were 'all accusing-"

"Oh, I missed a scratch right next to your lip," Crusher cut off. "Here-let me seal it up. Don't move, now .... The Carda.s.sians suspected a Bajoran rebel group of manufacturing the disease, and they were partly right. The rebels were happy to make sure the Carda.s.sians caught the disease, until they found out that Bajorans could get it too. And there was no way the Bajorans at that time had the resources or the science infrastructure to develop something as advanced as cross-species vital infection. They can't even do it now, and back then they were subjugated. Not only the Deep s.p.a.ce Nine infection, but we also found out that two years earlier several human-alien hybrids were infected with an unidentified virus, and that's unheard-of in nature. This thing's being systematically mutated, targeted, and delivered."

Iavo stopped pacing briefly. "I take it those were not all human and the same alien hybrids."

"No, they were all mixed up. People with that kind of genetics just can't 'catch' the stone thing naturally. There you go, Mr. Hashley, all patched up. You'll be sore, but you'll live. Now, I want you to just stay right here with me and Data would help us do what we have to do." She straightened, handed Data the seamer to put back in the reed-pack, then turned to Iavo. "All fight, Sentinel, I'm ready to start treating the empress. Are you ready to help?"

The tall imperial official glanced at the two femme servants, then met the gaze of one of the four guards. They seemed to be communicating, but not in the way one would expect of a senior government official and a clutch of underlings from way, way under. Iavo clutched his hands before him, flexed them, stretched his fingers, looked at the furry carpet for a moment then raised his eyes again at the nearest guard.

Such a simple step took a very long time, as choices go. Finally, seeming to make a decision or part of one, Iavo turned his back to the guards as if deeply troubled by their presence. "What do you need from us?"

Crasher watched the guards for a moment. Were they averting their eyes on purpose? "First of all, I want these women out of here. Data and Mr. Hashley can be my a.s.sistants. And I'd like you to cool it off by fifteen degrees in here. Clear that incense or whatever's burning out of the chamber and circulate some fresh air" "But this is how we always-"

"If 'always' was working, you wouldn't need me here, would you? Coot, and air, please."

Iavo paused, seemed to be deciding between being insulted and some other reaction Crusher couldn't make out.

Once again the Sentinel met the eyes of the guard nearest to him.

"We'll do as you instruct, Doctor," he agreed, speaking slowly. Hypnotically he robbed a single fingernail. "Do you think you can save her?"

Chapter Seventeen.

STILES' HANDS SHOOK as he stood beside the Saskatoon's command chair. On the other side of the chair, Amba.s.sador Spock placidly standing, the elderly Leonard McCoy sitting in a console chair-both men watched the approach of a forbidden planet in a forbidden sector. Stiles had offered the doctor the command chair, but McCoy had demurred, saying that only the "golden boy" should sit there. Stiles hadn't been able to sit in their presence, so the chair went empty through the entire voyage. Even when Alan brought tea.

Every regulation in several civilizations prevented their coming here, yet here they flew. The hoops of outposts, stations, guard ships, patrols, and bureaucratic drumbeating they'd had to jump through had left Stiles with a headache that was still here days and days later. The tension of moving into Romulan s.p.a.ce to drop off Dr. Crusher and Data had been enough to peel fruit, and now Saskatoon was deep inside Red Sector, trailing deals and bribes and threats and name-dropping that had gotten them all the way here.

For Stiles, though, this was the door of purgatory. He couldn't keep his hands warm any more. The self-examination was no fun either. Why was he so nervous? He had these heavy hitters with him, didn't he?

Why was his stomach twisted up into a spiral? The absence of foolish c.o.c.kiness should've been rea.s.suring and mature, but the fact was he wished he still had it. That zing of thinking he knew everything had protected him from a whole lot of scared. Wishing he could feel his fingers, he wondered if those two men over there had ever preferred to pull their own teeth out than go in someplace they had to go. Duty, cause, purpose, rank, ability-all those things fell short of the driving force he needed to overcome what he felt. There was only one thing drawing him forward, against all the forces pushing him back.

Gripping one hand with the other to hide the trembling, he looked briefly to portside, to Travis and Alan. Alan winked rea.s.suringly, and Travis gave him a thumbs-up. They were willing to go.

Embarra.s.sed, he puckered his shoulders. His friends were rea.s.suring him, supporting him into the unknown. It should be the other way around. "Hero," he muttered. No one heard. He barely heard himself. Spock glanced at him.

The planet of his dread swelled on the main screen and six of the ancillary monitors. "Approach, Eric?" Travis prodded from the port side.

"Him? Oh... sorry. Helm-let's see... come to point nine, equatorial approach vector, angle four one. No-four two. There's a constant thermal over that big canyon"'